Rules Surgeons Live By

Last Thursday, I rounded in the Surgery department. St. Fozzie's has a couple requirements of the folks in leadership, one of which is that they regularly and consistently "round" on other departments. It gets you out there and allows you a first-hand look at what other departments do on a daily basis. That, and if anyone has issues, they're much more likely to tell YOU than they are their regular management team. It's weird, but it works.

So I rounded in Surgery this week. Because it's sterile, you have to get into scrubs to just walk in the door. My first mistake was that I forgot my sneakers and ended up fitting the sterile booties over my heels. Once I got over that, I was able to meet and touch base with the managers of the holding area, surgery, and post-anesthesia care. In surgery, I hung out in the docs' lounge for a while. That's where you go to get the REAL scoop of what's going on; the docs hang out in there between cases and gossip about anyone and anything. THAT should be the next sitcom on NBC. Just put a teddy cam in that room and hire an SNL writer to transcribe and insert a few slapstick remarks!

Anyway, I chatted up one of my favorite surgeons. He's old and gray and about to retire. But he possesses this amazing fount of wisdom and other surgeons/students revere him as a sage of surgery. He told me that there are three key rules to live by and if anyone adopts these three rules, they will succeed:

1. Be fully prepared.

2. Be on time. Always.

3. Have a personality (or preferably, a sense of humor).

I wonder if the Boy Scouts of America appreciate his take on their central facets! He punctuated this conversation by offering me a piece of pineapple upside-down cake...which was really a gross-looking, squishy orangey-brown, donut-shaped positioning device that they put under peoples' rear ends in surgery!